Meat company Anzco has commercialised 26 new products as diverse as bones, blood and membranes for humans using research from a seven-year Primary Growth Partnership.
And its FoodPlus programme has identified more than 30 others and has a further eight ingredient and 10 healthcare products under consideration for commercialisation.
The $27 million Primary Growth Partnership is forecast to increase gross domestic product by $200m by 2030 and has increased jobs in the company by 102, many highly skilled and as diverse as advanced processing, technical product development and commercialisation.
Anzco healthcare business manager Steve Cartwright says the project enabled the development of new markets and products for beef products previously sold to a third party or for which the company did not have a market.
Chief executive Peter Conley says supplying products to the healthcare sector has been especially successful.
It now supplies pericardium to major healthcare providers for use in heart-valve replacement surgery and blood for serum used in the manufacturing of vaccines.
Progress in this area has been enhanced by the recent purchase of an Australian blood business.
Some bones traditionally processed into meat and bone meal now have a market as culinary stocks and for orthodontic surgery to help repair serious bone fractures.
Anzco worked on the stock and broth programme with joint venture partner, Taranaki Bio Extract.
The meat company has since bought a plant outside the PGP programme to develop new stock and broth for soup, sauce, gravy, pies and flavouring.
It is a complex process with the base for a traditional Korean soup taking 12 hours to make but a new Anzco process will reduce that time.
Cartwright says developing markets was a slow process because the products are low-volume and high-quality but are high-margin business, a contrast to the meat industry’s traditional high-volume, low-margin model.
Orders can be quite small, ranging from a few hundred kilograms to a few thousand individual items.
“For a business that kills some 400,000 cattle a year it is small volume.”
Even getting to the point of selling product has been a long, time-consuming exercise taking three to four years from an initial introduction to a potential buyer and making a sale.
In addition to cementing normal business links time is needed to validate products and processes and meet government regulations and standards.
Conley says the project was designed to do more with what is already available and ultimately improve sector profitability and viability by adding value to lower-value parts of a carcase.
“The industry has already achieved a lot with its higher-value cuts and the opportunity for FoodPlus is in adding value to lower-value parts of the carcase,” he says.
Cartwright says the project was market-led and a key part was to identify customers and supply chains Anzco could supply.
“Technically, some products are not new. It’s just that Anzco or New Zealand companies in general haven’t participated or they have been a raw material supplier to a third party or have not taken ownership through to the end customer,” he says.
That involved tracking the supply chain for some existing products handled by a third party.
It then identified and approached end users to supply the materials direct.
Conley says lessons learned from the exercise will enable Anzco to grow and expand new product development.
“The longer-term legacy of FoodPlus is a stronger culture of innovation within the business and a continued focus and awareness of the opportunities to add value across the business.”
